Manfred Novak, the UN human rights commission's special investigator on torture, told the Guardian he is seeking permission through the Foreign Office to visit Britain to discuss the issue with the home secretary, Charles Clarke.In a statement on Tuesday night, Prof Novak said that the government's intention to return radical preachers to their countries of origin, even though some of those countries have a track record of human rights abuses, "reflects a tendency in Europe to circumvent the international obligation not to deport anybody if there is a serious risk that he or she might be subjected to torture".His intervention came as Mr Clarke, in response to the London bombings, yesterday introduced a list of "unacceptable behaviour" which would allowing him to deport or exclude foreign citizens for glorifying or encouraging terrorism. Mr Clarke said the first exclusions and deportations would take place within the "next few days".He rejected the UN criticism. He said"the human rights of those people who were blown up on the tube in London on July 7 are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights of the people who committed those acts."He added: "I wish the UN would look at human rights in the round, rather than simply focusing all the time on the terrorist."But Prof Novak refused to accept the rebuke. "The UN is strongly concerned about terrorism and counter-terrorism. But there are certain standards that have to be observed in the context of counter-terrorism," he said last night. "We in the western democratic countries, in the fight against terrorism, should not step over these limits by violating international law."

Bandy comments:

In other words, the UN “human rights commission” says a nation has no right to toss out folks openly advocating violence, mass murder, or even the religious justification for the destruction of the nation itself, if the hatemonger might be “persecuted” in their country of origin. Obtaining the assurance of the government of the country of origin is not sufficient, if the UN deems that country to be prone to use “torture”.This of course conveniently overlooks the fact that the hatemonger is in the host country in the first place only because that country chose to allow him entry. So now, somehow, “international law” guarantees an immigrant the right to stay in a foreign land, no matter how he abuses that courtesy afforded him by the host. Remember, this is the same UN that paid for the Palestinians’ “today Gaza, tomorrow every inch of the land” propaganda barrage, a clear statement of the Palestinian intention to eradicate the nation of Israel (a nation recognized, by the way, by the UN) from the face of the earth, and either kill the Israelis or “drive them into the sea.”But in the view of the UN, the “human rights” of the Islamist hatemongers somehow outweigh the right of the citizens of Britain to not be slaughtered in the streets. The UN takes the position that “international law” and the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees prohibits deporting them back to their home countries “where they could be persecuted”. ... if the Geneva Convention of 1951 prohibits deporting some monster who is trying to wage his jihad in your own back yard, killing as many of your women and children as he can, the solution seems pretty simple: repudiate the Geneva Convention on refugees. If a European agreement is perceived as preventing the deportation of these people, then withdraw from that agreement. And if the UN wants to complain too much about it, the western nations need to shut off the financial spigots and let them fund their own perverse activities.What the UN fails to understand is that it is not a world governing body, much as it would like to be. It is an increasingly undemocratic and anti-western club for the pushing of the agendas of penny-ante states trying to collect a payoff from economic success of the the western democracies. What authority it has, what legitimacy it has, derives from its reasonably utilitarian availability as a forum, not from any right to dictate to any nation, member or not.And the more the UN takes stupid positions like this, the less attention any of the nations it really needs for its survival will pay to its ridiculous pronouncements.